My Images Aren’t Showing Up. Why?

You may find sometimes that your background image isn’t showing up when you test or send your emails – but why this is the case is not always immediately obvious. Here are a few reasons why you might be experiencing this issue:

Answer #1:

You have included no text in your campaign, just an image. CAN SPAM compliance requires all campaigns to include text, even if it is just as simple as a “Hello,”, though a good ratio of text to images in any campaign helps to increase it’s chances of good delivery. Read our deliverability guide for more information on using text and images well.

Answer #2:

Your image is linked to a relative URL.

There are two kinds of URL, relative, and absolute. Often when we build campaigns and write HTML on our computers, we use relative URLs to link to images or files because your HTML is only being read in one place – on the same computer that the files reside on. But when you put your campaign online and send it our to your subscriber list, you need to change the relative URLs to be absolute URLs.

To give a rough analogy, if you’re in your house with some friends and someone asks where your next-door neighbor Mark lives, you’ll probably say “Oh, he’s next door.” You probably wouldn’t say “On a planet called Earth, in a country called Canada, in Acmetown, on 32 Foobar St.” if this conversation is taking place in the living room of 30 Foobar St.

Relative URLs are something like the ‘next door’ example; they’re the equivalent of saying “down the road, turn left, walk on for a few blocks, you can’t miss it.” They only make sense if they are given within a certain context.

Absolute URLs are just the opposite – they require no context, just very specific instructions about something’s location no matter what the context – in this case, an image in your email campaign.

If you don’t tell your campaign where to find your image with specific location information, your images won’t be found and will not display in your campaign.